Improving a conjugate-heat-transfer immersed-boundary method

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide the current state of the art in the development of a computer code combining an immersed boundary method with a conjugate heat transfer (CHT) approach, including some new findings. In particular, various treatments of the fluid-solid-interface conditions are compared in order to determine the most accurate one. Most importantly, the method is capable of computing a challenging three dimensional compressible turbulent flow past an air cooled turbine vane. Design/methodology/approach - The unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) equations are solved within the fluid domain, whereas the heat conduction equation is solved within the solid one, using the same spatial discretization and time-marching scheme. At the interface boundary, the temperatures and heat fluxes within the fluid and the solid are set to be equal using three different approximations. Findings - This work provides an accurate and efficient code for solving three dimensional CHT problems, such as the flow through an air cooled gas turbine cascade, using a coupled immersed boundary (IB) CHT methodology. A one-to-one comparison of three different interface-condition approximations has shown that the two multidimensional ones are slightly superior to the early treatment based on a single direction and that the one based on a least square reconstruction of the solution near the IB minimizes the oscillations caused by the Cartesian grid. This last reconstruction is then used to compute a compressible turbulent flow of industrial interest, namely, that through an air cooled gas turbine cascade. Another interesting finding is that the very promising approach based on wall functions does not combine favourably with the interface conditions for the temperature and the heat flux. Therefore, current and future work aims at developing and testing appropriate temperature wall functions, in order to further improve the accuracy - for a given grid - or the efficiency - for a given accuracy - of the proposed methodology. Originality/value - An accurate and efficient IB CHT method, using a state of the art URANS parallel solver, has been developed and tested. In particular, a detailed study has elucidated the influence of different interface treatments of the fluid-solid boundary upon the accuracy of the computations. Last but not least, the method has been applied with success to solve the well-known CHT problem of compressible turbulent flow past the C3X turbine guide vane.